What is customer experience automation (CXA)?
As the name suggests, customer experience automation (CXA) refers to the process of empowering customers to perform tasks at various touchpoints with very little to no staff intervention. The goal is not only to improve the overall customer experience, but also to help businesses save significant resources on repetitive, time-consuming tasks.
If you want more information on this topic, check out the FAQ section below:
Question #1: What are the benefits of customer experience automation (CXA)?
As we have seen earlier, the biggest benefits of customer experience automation (CXA) are:
- It helps improve the overall customer experience
- Allows businesses to save serious resources on repetitive, tedious tasks
Let us take a closer look at each one:
First, customer experience automation (CXA) helps provide customers with better experiences by simplifying and speeding up tasks—such as booking flights, doing bank transactions, and basic troubleshooting—that would normally take up a lot of time and back-and-forth with human staff.
Second, it helps businesses save a lot of time and money by minimising or eliminating the need to allocate time, money, and people the performance of repetitive customer service-related tasks. As a result, customer experience automation (CXA) enables businesses to ‘serve’ more customers more quickly without having to spend more time or money on doing so.
Question #2: What are the downsides of customer experience automation (CXA)?
The main downside of customer experience automation (CXA), just like any other form of automation, is that it makes specific jobs either partially or entirely redundant. Examples would be:
- Online flight booking platforms and human travel booking agents
- Self-checkout counters and cashiers and baggers
- Chatbots and chat support agents
- Customer-telephony integration (CTI) and phone operators
In addition to this, depending on the type of automation you want, you may have to invest a lot of capital up front to build and deploy the system you need.
Question #3: What are the risks of customer experience automation (CXA)?
The number one risk of customer experience automation (CXA), if it is executed poorly, is that instead of improving the overall customer experience, it may end up making things worse.
For example, if you have an online store that automates the entire shopping experience but still requires the customer to manually confirm their order and details via phone, SMS, or email with a member of your team, then your automation only unnecessarily slows the ordering process down.
For something like this to work, it needs to completely replace the manual confirmation process. After all, online order forms are designed to collect all the information you need anyway—and the customer clicking the ‘Complete Order’ button is really all the confirmation you need.
Question #4: What are the limitations of customer experience automation (CXA)?
The main limitation of customer experience automation (CXA) is that it can only be used for repetitive tasks with predictable inputs, outputs and processes.
Let us take self-checkout counters again, for example. The only reason they work is that the input (i.e., the customer running the barcodes of the items they are buying under a scanner) and the output (i.e., the prices and other details of the items) are both known.
Even during payment, the input and output are also known. The input is the customer payment and the output is the receipt (and change, if any).
The process also remains the same no matter how many customers use the counter.
The same goes for online flight booking systems. They work because the inputs, outputs, and processes are extremely predictable:
- The customer searches for available flights on their desired dates
- The system returns all flights that fit the search criteria
- The customer books the flights they want
- The system confirms the bookings
Customer experience automation (CXA) cannot be effectively used to fully replace, say, human customer support representatives. While it is being used—in the form of chatbots—to quickly answer basic and often repetitive customer questions, it cannot predict all possible concerns and conversation flows.